About 90 percent of all diamonds that enter the U.S. pass through New York’s diamond district, though you’d never know it walking down West 47th Street, a warren of grimy aluminum and puffy-coated hawkers, the claustrophobic energy of deal-making, all of it crammed like carbon atoms into a one-block expanse.
But to Gary Barnett, diamond Read More
The naming of a neighborhood is always a somewhat elaborate tug of a war, but last year residents of Dumbo faced a rare quandary, when City Hall officialy named the area New York’s Digital District. Though the neighborhood has been reborn with a new moniker roughly every half-century-Olympia, in keeping with the post-Revolutionary trend of Read More
Even to the locals who’ve watched it happen, the hyperkinetic transformation of Frederick Douglass Boulevard is still a one-two punch of baffled awe–part time-lapse metamorphosis, part coy erasure. The south Harlem throughway of brownstones and anonymous bodegas suddenly speckles with glass condos, blank-faced and steely purposed. It has yielded to the sort of eating and Read More
In the early-morning hours, when most New Yorkers are sleeping, thousands of trucks thunder in and out of Hunts Point’s industrial sprawl.
Roughly 60 percent of the city’s produce is shuttled through the peninsula’s food distribution center, the largest wholesale food market in the world and, since 2005, home of the historic Fulton Fish Market. Read More
It’s hard to call New York’s history a circular one–we build over our past too fervently for that–but nonetheless, certain corners of the city manage to accumulate something like odd rhymes and resonance with their pasts, perhaps a barely conscious tic of repetition.
At the turn of the last century, Washington Street in Lower Manhattan Read More
At its far western edge, 14th Street is the kind of time-lapsed parable of social transformation that quickens Manhattanites’ pulses. Nights in the meatpacking district, once punctuated by the rhythms of carcasses being loaded into trucks, have become scenes of teetering stilettos and impossibly hip clubs that were over the minute you heard about them. Read More
Amid Columbia University’s ongoing border skirmishes–the result of its planned 17-acre expansion northward–even the name of the embattled neighborhood is contested.
Some favor Mahattanville, a moniker harking back to the 19th-century Quaker village that sprang up, as contemporary guidebooks put it, a whole “eight miles from New York.” Others contend the area is simply an Read More
